


That Which Stays

by Mistystarshine



Series: Tokyo Ghoul Horror Week [4]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, lots of spoilers within, up to chapter 50 at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:10:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5105861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mistystarshine/pseuds/Mistystarshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Many things have changed over the course of Akira's life, but few have resulted in joy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Which Stays

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Day 4 of Tokyo Ghoul Horror Week, the prompt being Changes. It's a day late due to RL reasons, but hopefully the fact that it's longer than the others will make up for it. This one has a dual dedication to Fineinthemorning and Rikukari.

She hated ghouls.

It was wrong for such a young child to be able to say that they _hated_ something. To be fair, she hadn’t been certain that she hated them from the start. She knew that her parents fought them, that they were monsters who needed to die. A few times, back when she was first figuring out what her parent's job entailed, she had even asked if maybe they could show mercy to ghouls, if they weren’t people too. Her parents had put a stop to that. While ghouls _looked_ like people they weren’t, not really. They ate people. They did terrible things and they liked it. They didn’t have feelings like humans did. So yes, she knew that they had to be taken care of. But she hadn’t been sure that she hated them.

That changed when her mother went off to fight one day and didn’t come back. That was when she knew. Akira Mado hated ghouls.

* * *

 

Her father had always been serious about his work. When he lost Kasuka, he became even more so. He was always there for her and proved to be a spectacular parent, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t notice how everything that wasn’t herself or seemed to fall away. It didn’t stop her from worrying about him.

The choice to join the academy wasn’t much of a choice at all. As an investigator, she would be able to help her father. He would be able to get the promotions he had turned down for her sake in the past. One day, she may even help him get revenge on the One-Eyed Owl.

It was when she was at the academy that she first heard her father referred to as ‘obsessed’ rather than ‘serious’. ‘ _The quinque-obsessed maniac_ ’, that was what they called him. She had tried her best to defend him. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that words weren’t the best way to defend him. Instead, she worked harder, got better, climbed to the top of her class, tried her best to prove herself. Maybe they would stop once they saw what she was capable of.

That wasn’t how it worked. Her abilities were recognized, yes, but at the same time, she was seen as being unfeeling because of them. ‘Unfeeling,’ some said. ‘Obsessed,’ murmured others. ‘Must have inherited that Mado crazy.’ Eventually, she learned to ignore them. From others, her abilities garnered jealousy. The most blatant example of this was Takizawa Seidou. He threw barbs at her only to flounder when he discovered that she gave as good as she got. The floundering didn’t last long. Their rivalry may be fairly one-sided, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

At first, she merely saw him as an annoyance. The word ‘annoyance’ would continue to apply to him, but over time, although she didn’t say it, it came to be joined by the word ‘friend’.

* * *

The news came not long after her graduation. In a way it wasn’t surprising; death always found a ghoul investigator, one way or another. At the same time, it seemed impossible. It couldn’t be him. Never him. He still had so much to do! So much to accomplish.

She still had to help him…

On that day, Mado Kureo died. On that day, Mado Akira became an orphan. On that day, she cried in a way that she hadn’t in years.

The very next day, she was appeared composed and ready to look. She had been offered some time off to mourn. She had turned it down. ‘Emotionless,’ came the whispers floating around her. ‘Cold. Robotic.”

She paid them no mind. After all, she had a job to do.

* * *

Her transfer to the twentieth ward had been accepted without complaint. She didn’t complain when she discovered that Takizawa would be in the same ward as her, although she couldn’t say that he returned the favor. In a way, his presence was a reassuring one, even if he _was_ obnoxious as ever. It was something that had remained the same.

The problem was her new partner.

Amon Koutarou. Her father’s old partner, the one who hadn’t been able to help him, hadn’t been able to save him. She decided that she hated him before she met him.

Too bad you couldn’t _decide_ things like that.

Akira took steps to nurture her loathing. When he talked to her she remained distant, if not as formal as he would have preferred. Every attempt he made to get closer to her was countered by her attempts to keep him at a distance. He didn’t give up though. Over time she came to learn things about him, and during the Kanou raid they thought together and fought well. But she had not yet resigned herself to liking them. Why, then, had she accepted his invitation to go eat with him and Takizawa? Intuition. A gut-deep feeling that told her that she should. A bad call? Maybe, maybe not. It depended on how you chose to view the events that followed.

She got drunk. There was no other way to put it. She didn’t even drink that much, but Akira still managed to get drunk. In retrospect, she should have seen this coming. She always seemed to overestimate how much she was able to handle. The word ‘lightweight’ definitely applied to her. As a result of her drunkenness, she proceeded to spill her emotions to Amon Koutarou and tell him that she hated him. That much she remembered. Most of what came after it… not so much.

Come morning, she was tipped off by her headache being significantly _less_ than what it should be. The pills and water spoke all too clearly of what had happened. Her partner… doing push-ups on her balcony.

She teased him about it, but the fact remained that this marked a change in their relationship. It got harder and harder to dislike him. Much like with Takizawa, her feelings toward him began to change, this time much against her will. What was cold became casual, and what was casual became something resembling warm.

* * *

“You should get a pet.” It was a more or less pointless thought on a day that was mostly paperwork so far.

Amon looked up from the file he had been signing, blinking in surprise. “Why?”

Akira shrugged. “They make good companions, and you could probably take good care of one if you took some time off from push-ups.” While her outward expression remained unchanged, she smirked internally at the flash of embarrassment across his face. “Maybe a cat. If you’re lucky, you might get one as beautiful as Maris Stella.”

 _Something_ crossed his face then. He tried to hide it quickly, but not quick enough for her to fail to notice. “What?” she asked. “You have a problem with cats?”

“No,” he quickly assured her, “not at all.”

“So you don’t think that Maris Stella’s beautiful?” There it was, the expression of guilt. Akira sent him a look of deep insult on her cat’s behalf while laughing on the inside. “You, blind man, owe her an apology.”

Guilt turned to befuddlement. “What? Why?”

“You were in my apartment with her and didn’t appreciate her.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he protested.

“It doesn’t matter. She can _sense_ it.” Mild confusion, exasperation, and finally acceptance. His expressions really were a wonder to behold sometimes.

“I’ll be sure to apologize if I see her again,” he relented. Akira nodded and looked back down at her paperwork, a small smile playing at her lips.

* * *

The nature of her feelings for him began to move in a certain direction over time. Eventually, it even got to the point that she acted on them. A rejected kiss. But she wasn’t one to give up, and sometimes she wondered what would have happened given time. She didn’t get to find out.

How foolish of her. She should have known by now; she was destined to lose everyone she loved.

Amon and Takizawa, lost in one blow. One terrible raid. Again she was accused of being unfeeling. The difference was that this time she wasn’t able to brush it off. It was one of the few times that she cried in front of someone else.

At least that was one thing that would never change. She would always be lonely.

* * *

 _Sasaki Haise_. That was what they were calling him. As if he wasn’t a murderous ghoul. As if he wasn’t partially responsible for the death of her father, for Amon, for so much of that damned Anteiku raid going wrong. As if amnesia meant it had never happened. They wanted him to be an _investigator_ as part of some experiment.

They wanted her to be his partner.

‘ _Mentor,_ ’ Arima had said. ‘ _Mother figure._ ’

She did it. She would do her job. However, she was determined not to come to care for him. She would never look at this lost boy with his silly puns and outwardly good intentions and see anything but a monster.

For someone who had been accused of having no emotions, not only did she have an awful lot of them, but she apparently had minimal control over them. The negative feelings didn’t fade away, not entirely. They did, however, come to be accompanied by more positive ones as well. It was an unpleasant sort of internal conflict.

The times he accidentally called her ‘mom’ were annoying yet slightly amusing, but mostly without consequence. After all, it was what Arima had wanted.

It was when she caught herself nearly referring to him as her son that she felt alarmed. A bad sign. Bad signs that just kept coming, from every time he almost made her smile to how bad it felt when she interrogated him. Sasaki Haise was supposed to be a ghoul, right? She hated ghouls.

She didn’t hate him.

* * *

The quinx squad had come together, established their own sort of normal, and gone on to become the laughing squad of the CCG. The freaks. The experiments. The unnecessary risk. She was all too aware of how much they were looked down upon. Herself as well, considering her affiliation with the group. It was nothing she couldn’t handle. By now, she was used to being called crazy.

The auction raid was one of their first big missions. They had had assignments before, yes, such as the Serpent, but nothing like this. They did well at the auction. It went a significant way towards making them less of a joke and more of something to be taken seriously. How she wished that was all there was to it. That she could be proud of them and let that be that. But no. For her, loss overpowered any pride at the thought of the mission. A three-year-old loss made sharp and stinging and new. The discovery that someone she had lost wasn’t actually lost, but was at the same time.

They had never found Takizawa Seidou’s body. They had assumed - she had assumed - that he had been eaten. Not this. How was she to know that this had happened? How could it have happened? (Could she have stopped it?)

When she saw her old friend for the first time in three years, he was covered in the blood of her fellow investigators. Madness cloaked him just like all that viscera. His eyes, one like she had remembered yet not quite, the other black and red. _Ghoul_.

She hadn’t fought him. He hadn’t stayed around long enough to get the chance. She felt sick, horrified, the type of despair that came with knowing that someone you cared about had suffered a fate worse than death. For him to change so much- what had happened? What had they done to him? _Could she have stopped it?_

Next time, would she have to fight him? Would she have to kill him? It should be easy, in theory. He was a ghoul. He appeared to have _embraced_ it. Akira hated ghouls. Ghouls were monsters. If she showed him mercy, accepted him as a person, what would it say about all the others? (What did it mean about Haise?)

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered about another investigator whose body was never found. She pushed it away for the time being; she couldn’t deal with it yet.

* * *

When did things that used to be so simple get so complicated?

There had been signs of cannibalism on dead Aogiri members at the auction. She hadn’t thought much of it then. Now she looked back and thought, what if? It was a painful thought, that they both may have been so close to her. Even more-so was the question of what sort of state he might be in.

Saiko had been cornered during the Rose Investigation. But someone, _a ghoul_ , had saved her. She had described him as a big, dark man. Tall. Cloaked. Potentially a ukaku. He had something that looked like a quinque and three fingers on one hand. The one that _he_ was reported to have lost. She hadn’t been able to answer when she had asked if she had one or two kakugans, said that she hadn’t been able to get a good look at him beneath the cloak.

The details were sparse, but they were enough to make her certain. It was him. Her intuition said so, and it hadn’t been wrong yet. Just as Sasaki started her research she started her own.

What did this mean? He was alive, but he wasn’t human. There hadn’t been any reports of him preying on humans, but he had to eat. _He used to be human_. Just not anymore. Even if he was in a better state than Takizawa, what would happen? They may only be ‘half’ ghoul, they may have been human before, but just like with Haise, it was a fine line to walk.

There were so many variables, so many risks, so much that tasted of tragedy. Even so, there was a part of her that wanted to laugh just as much as she wanted to cry. He was alive. Haise hadn’t killed him. Amon Koutarou was alive.

After losing so much, it felt odd to have even the faintest hope that something may return.

* * *

She had always thought that Haise’s memories may return. Now, after everything that had happened, it seemed like that may be starting to happen.

“ _Who am I?_ ”

Mado Akira hated ghouls. However, she also loved Haise in a way that had originally been an assignment but came to be very real.

“ _You are you._ ”

Things may be changing, but that wasn’t always bad.


End file.
